


Let's Dance to Joy Division

by harrehsbutterfly



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Drabble, Fluff, Marauders, Marauders Friendship, Marauders' Era, The Marauders - Freeform, brief - Freeform, collection, mention of drug use/drinking, rebel, teenage drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-02-25
Packaged: 2018-09-26 20:48:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9921584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harrehsbutterfly/pseuds/harrehsbutterfly
Summary: 20 different snapshots of the Marauders (Mostly Sirius) at different points in their lives together.





	

**Author's Note:**

> A collection of Sirius-centric Marauder drabbles, spanning across their lives (but beginning at Hogwarts), written for the 20 Song drabble challenge. I put my phone on shuffle and used each song that came up as an impetus for a short piece, written within the parameters of the song. On a few of them I ran over, either because I couldn't leave it where I was or I got a bit hooked. They dip in and out of time periods, but I think it's followable. Obviously it's not my best writing, but it was so freeing to just have to write and not over think - I haven't edited it since I wrote it, and so fingers crossed you like it.

1\. Sirius lifted the dusty tumbler of Firewhisky to his lips, and took a long, deep gulp, knocking it back neat in one smooth, flowing arc. He leaned against the left-hand pillar of his four poster, both shoes kicked off from his feet, displaying one blue and one orange sock on each respective foot. He smiled. James pointed his wand at the enchanted gramophone and it began to turn. ‘Revolution’ by the Beatles started up, intro as familiar and punchy as his own heartbeat, and James began to move in time with the beat, dragging his best friend up with him. The letter from Sirius’ parents fell to the floor as the pair twirled together, laughter exploding into the air above Ringo’s heavy snare drum tapping.  
‘It’s gonna be… alright’ The lyrics permeated his ears as he spun, giddily and out of time, and, for the first time in a while, he believed them. 

[Revolution - the Beatles]

2\. The wind whipped through Sirius’s hair as he leaned forward over his broomstick. Behind him, Moony’s bony fingers were digging into his waist, and he heard his friend hiss in his ear – ‘Sirius, STOP. Too fast, too fast, ohdeargod this is much too fast please stop’ – and a smirk spread across his face. He paused, hovered in mid-air, and heard Remus breathe a sigh of relief – just as he accelerated, descended to the sound of Remus’s screams, and felt his feet brush the back lake. For a second – he was wholly and completely alive. 

[Black Limousine - The Rolling Stones]

3\. One. Two. Three. Buttons popped from his shirt, slowly sliding from his body to reveal his naked torso, breathing heavy, unnamed female lips pressing against his collarbone as his fingers fumbled with her jeans. He gasped, hoped this one would be different, felt the cold of the stone wall press against his back, spine almost uncomfortable against the sudden hardness. Liquor made his head spin, burst shot of images – her whispering his name, him searching for hers, red top on the floor, easy rhythm. Lying on the floor, wasted. Losing it, losing it, lost it.

[Lose It - Oh Wonder]

4\. The door sprung open, revealing his three best friends lying on their beds, the fire crackling, a perfect, undisturbed, untouchable image. James sprawls across his bed, fully clothed, shoes not even off. Remus is neat, not even his presence makes a dent in the perfect bedclothes as he carefully, precisely examines his potions textbook. Peter slumps, a stack of books beside him that he hasn’t opened but pretends he knows – and Sirius is home. He drops his suitcases, embraces James, who flies over and engulfs him – and he knows that despite last night, despite the fucking insane sex he had that blew his mind with the girl he remembers they kept telling him not to get with and despite all the tiny nuclear fissions it’s sparked off inside of him – he is home now. 

[Let's Dance To Joy Division - The Wombats]

5\. Remus is running late. As usual. And he’s meeting Sirius. Who is always late, but won’t be this time. His friend hasn’t been late once since – since The Incident. James hasn’t forgiven him, Peter does what James says and Remus is left falling apart. He hates, hates, hates this feeling in the pit of his stomach – but he can’t just not forgive Sirius. His best friend is like ecstasy or something – so entirely vibrant and all encompassing – and hell he’s addicted. And going back is going to be a disaster – a tragedy of epic proportions and Remus knows this, knows Sirius was an absolute fucking idiot – but he just wants his best friend back in his life – and he also knows as soon as he sees him, pale and shaking and with that (beautiful) smudged eyeliner around his lower lids, that there is nothing inside of him that won’t say ‘it’s okay’.

[Greek Tragedy - The Wombats]

6\. It’s cold in Scotland in February. And Remus is pissed off. But Sirius wanted a cigarette, and so they all sit and watch as he lights up easily, not coughing or talking too quickly to cover up his inexperience like he did when they were sixteen – but with the practised hands of someone who does this too often. Sirius looks like a ghost now. Pale and shadowy and the burning cherry of his cigarette is all they look at. Don’t speak. The traffic of the local muggle town is still busy, and James is flinching. But they definitely don’t look at the track marks on the inside of his wrists, at the not quite washed away blood around his nostrils, at his pale, slightly blue fingers. Everything that they’ve left unsaid in this war is leaving them, hanging in the air like Sirius’ cigarette smoke, blowing away into irretrievable nothingness. 

[The A Team - Ed Sheeran]

7\. Sirius is sitting in his cell, the hunger pains sparking inside his stomach. His head is spinning with what Remus is doing now; Remus is all he thinks about now (Peter doesn’t get a look in, he won’t, the evil evil evil bastard) – if he has a girlfriend, if he’s out drinking, if he’s trying like Sirius is to not even think about James and Lily and oh God he wishes he hadn’t spent his last days as a free man thinking that his best friend was the spy. He wishes he’d told James and Lily. He wishes he’d said I love you. 

[Ophelia - The Lumineers]

8\. Sirius’ hair is long now, and James ruffles it and calls him a mop – but who is he to talk, really? – because they all know he’s jealous. And they laugh and it’s okay that he isn’t a Slytherin because he has a genuine real best friend here, like he’s always wanted but didn’t know he could have , who he can laugh and joke with and tease, and he knows now that he shouldn’t repeat what his mother says to him at school because it makes the tall boy in the bed opposite twitch and the fat boy who admires them gasp and even James looks affronted and he can’t have that. So they slide down banisters and trip over the Slytherins and throw paper airplanes at each other and laugh. 

[Naive - The Kooks}

9\. James watches as the door opens and Sirius stumbles in, his face bruised and swollen, hands blue with cold, and he runs to his friend with his heart in his mouth. He wraps him up in a hug, too tight at first – he realises when his friend lets out a cry of pain and clutches his ribs – and he can’t tell who cries first, only that they are both crying and Sirius’ thin body is shaking and all he knows that never in a million years is his best friend going back to the Noble House of Black ever again. 

[Never Going Back Again - Fleetwood Mac]

10\. Remus is the first to stir the next morning and what he sees is carnage. Empty beer cans and firewhisky bottles litter the common room, and a ground out cigarette has scorched the fabric of the red armchair he had fallen asleep in. A sixth year fell asleep next to a puddle of his own vomit and James is lying with his head in the fireplace. His head hurts. McGonagall is going to kill them. Of course Sirius isn’t wearing any trousers and has lipstick trawled all over the side of his shirt. Remus ignores the flare of pain between his ribs at the sight and focuses instead on the action that the guilt of the sight of his Prefect badge pinned to previously unseen tapestry of Greta the Gargled stirs in him. 

[Scumbag City - The Strypes]

11\. Sirius’ heart pounds as he looks at Marlene beside him – she is so beautiful – and she has blown his mind as well as his pupils. He can’t get her out of his head – and he has to, because she’s dating James Wilkes from the year above – but honestly they’re like two magnets, and he is so in love and oh God he wants to tell Moony because although his friend is prickly for some reason when he brings up girls he’s shagged – he sighs and then says quietly ‘if they make you happy, I’m happy Sirius’ when he’s asked – he’s got to understand that this girl – this insane, raven haired, vibrant woman – is perfection.

[Eighty-Four - The Strypes]

12\. Tears have made their way out of closed eyelids before. Tracked their way down his cheeks when no one was looking, when he was safe at the top of the astronomy tower and no one knew where he was. But now Remus is by his side and he’s trying so very hard not to scream in agony as he realises that it’s Peter who is responsible for his best friend lying dead on the floor and Harry being dragged away to his evil Aunt and Uncle and he can’t escape this awful unbearable agony but he can’t tell Remus because no one can know. 

[Collapse - Vancouver Sleep Clinic]

13\. Remus has never watched Sirius undress. He’s seen the boy in some variety of nude one thousand times – but he’s never actually watched until now – until Sirius walks in alone, in the middle of the day when he thinks that no one is there, when he should be in lessons, when Remus is recovering from the full moon of two days ago on his own and trying to catch up on some work. He sits quite still, because something in his friend’s face is telling him that he shouldn’t say anything - not yet – to alert him to his presence. He sees Sirius ripping his shirt off, pulling the tie with frantic hands until the knot around his neck dissolves and it falls to the floor in a red and gold heap. It’s not until the shirt, the trousers and the socks hit the floor with soft pillowy thuds that Remus sees the scars that litter his back. Goosebumps crawl up his arms and he gasps when he sees they do not stop – a mesh of lines and slashes that straddle his friend’s spine and stretch round his ribs. Sirius is moving slower now, his face less panicked, and Remus realises with undue horror and a clench of his stomach that these are no accident. They are the remnants from the things Sirius doesn’t mention about home, of those incidents that they all have thought about but not put into words, that linger in the air whenever Sirius mentions that his parents ‘don’t like that’ with a grim laugh and a slight shake of hand. These are the belt marks, the curse marks, the burns that Sirius has not – or could not heal – and Remus just looks back down at his books for fear that Sirius will look up and see his friend watching him and cause a row. 

[It's Just My Skin - George Ezra] 

14\. Moony is frustrated. Sirius is maddening, infuriating – fickle. He’s forgetting the heartfelt confessions that they have made in the light of their dingy little flat in the North of London that he will stay and help and love Remus – he is out, every night, drinking and laughing and dancing with some other friends that Remus doesn’t know, won’t know because Sirius won’t tell him who they are – and coming home with blown pupils and bleeding nostrils and tipsy giggles. And Remus knows that it’s because Sirius is sick of the suspicion and the fear that Voldemort has brought that now lingers between them – but he’s sick of it. He’s sick and tired and he’s had enough. 

[While You're Out Looking For Sugar - Joss Stone]

15\. The sun is coming up and Sirius is smiling. He’s leaning over Remus’s prone figure as he sleeps in bed and the way the sun touches his dark curls it looks like he has a halo. ‘More like a fucking dark angel’ Remus thinks, when Sirius pounces on top of him and stirs him from his slumber and every bone aches, but he smiles anyway, because Sirius is smiling and James is laughing and Peter is right beside them falling over the neatly stacked textbooks, and they are a tangle of limbs as James topples on top of them, one big mess of sleep smudged eyes and Saturday mornings and boy smell and hope. 

[Don't Stop - Fleetwood Mac]

16\. James is angry and broken hearted and Remus is scared and he isn’t watching as James throws something from Peter’s bedside table to the floor and it smashes into a million pieces. Sirius stumbles from his bed and walks straight through the broken china and cuts his feet on the pieces in the process to his friend who is pacing a million miles an hour and walks with him. They walk together, James taller but Sirius slighter and more wild and unruly and together they cry horrors against girls who break hearts and say things they don’t mean and Sirius offers James a smoke to calm him from the fury that he spews out. It’s okay. 

[Now She's Gone - The Strypes] 

17\. Remus is pale, shaking and nearly sobbing as he looks to each grinning face and Sirius’ words ring in his ears – ‘look what we did, Moony look!’ – and then realises that his friends – his gorgeous incredible friends – have done what he thought they never would and broken every single rule in the process. They have become animagi for him – so that he doesn’t have to go through every debilitating transformation alone anymore, doesn’t have to rip his skin apart and howl at the moon alone and terrified ever again, but instead – he can have them with him. And although he wants to scream, tell them how dangerous it is – he can’t quite bring himself. 

[Worth The Fight - Broods]

18\. The sun is streaming through the Hospital Wing dormitory window as Remus wakes up and sees Sirius lying there with his hand in plaster, grinning at him.  
‘So you wouldn’t be alone!’, he grins cheerily, and although a slight flicker of pain crosses his face as he reflexively clenches his hand, he looks so proud of himself. ‘Punched the wall,’ he adds ruefully ‘So Pomfrey would let me in.’  
Remus almost lets out a choked sob then – he has never known this loyalty before – but he grins back as an unknown, unnamed feeling spreads its way through his fingertips and bleeds into him as the sun is bleeding into the Hospital Wing.

[You're The Best - Wet]

19\. Pictures litter the floor surrounding Remus’s bed, leaking their way under the table and his textbooks as he frantically searches for just the right one that he can put into an apology letter to Sirius. He screamed, said some evil, horrible things about Sirius and his family and his head hurts with disgust at it all. Sirius had looked so shocked and furious, and had left shaking – and the guilt Remus feels is appalling. Sirius had never meant it – he never did – but Remus had just meant so well, wanted to help his (boy)friend to actually get some help, tell someone about what his parents did to him, get out of there. But he had gone about it the wrong way and everything was a disaster, a huge messy disaster that matched the state of his floor and his feelings and his headspace.

[Recovery - Broods] 

20\. Sirius’ favourite memory of sixth year is of their first actual night out in a town that wasn’t Hogsmede – further than they had ever gone before – out into the actual local Muggle town in the dead of night, and he had ridden a motorbike for the first time and come off screaming with delight and laughing and James had lit a cigarette between his lips for him and he had almost kissed Moony for the first time, and despite everything, despite the gathering storm of Voldemort and his followers, everything was kind of okay. And they felt unstoppable. 

[So Far (It's Alright) - The 1975]

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think, please <3


End file.
